Respect

FICTION

In Glasgow they said grace at every meal. Every one — dinner, tea, breakfast, everything. Not just any old grace either, not a short one that you could just say, that you could let run off your tongue, but a great long one, with all the saints and the Virgin and everyone thrown in — everyone got a mention. His brother would intone it solemnly, like Father Mulligan, once his Da had gone. He was head of the household now. He’d hold his long, pale fingers steepled together, that pious look on his face. Never had a woman in his life that Robbie knew. No wonder he needed God so badly.

When it came on him, he couldn’t stop it, didn’t want to stop it. God, the power you had then, the power it gave you. Afterwards, he’d sleep like the dead. Then pick up the pieces.

It was her own fault, he thought. She must like it somewhere; something in her deep down liked it. Because she never fucking shut up. Never stopped when she could see it coming — she always went that bit further, said that thing she shouldn’t say. God, the things she could say. She had a mouth on her and no mistake.

But he’d gone too far with the cigarette. He could see that now. Something had changed between them. She was watching him. She’d got a look about her that he’d seen in other women.

With Janet, the one before Maggie, it was the cat. She was always petting and feeding it off the table — a filthy habit. The stupid fucker was always on your chair, never came when it was called. The look on her face. God — she never believed he’d do it. He loved that. Just tell him what he could and couldn’t do in his own house, her with her piranha jaw.

It’d let out a scream when it hit the wall. He hadn’t expected that and he dropped it sharpish. And then the blood and the brains everywhere. And then all the other blood; Janet standing, howling like a bitch with the blood running down her and pooling on the floor. She lost it then. She never could hold on to anything. He’d had to belt her just to shut her up.

He went to see her though, in the hospital. Not a drink in him for two days, the longest in maybe 20 years — it was an effort, but he felt bad about the baby. He meant it when he said he was sorry, but she got that pious look, turned her head away on the pillow, like she was the Virgin Fucking Mary or something. There were dark blue marks where the wires led through her jaw, clamping her mouth shut, resetting the bones. She looked like she’d no blood left in her.

That was how he lost her, that bloody cat. He’d offered to buy her a new one, but she just looked at him.

He met Maggie not long afterwards, at the bar where she used to work. He had the moustache by then, long and thin at the sides, the way he wore it now. He looked like a pirate, like a gypsy. Women liked him with that ‘tache. He caught her eye and he rolled down his shirt sleeves to cover his tattoos, and grinned at her. Those blue eyes were always a winner: six weeks later she moved herself and her kids in with him. Two boys to replace Janet’s boys — he’d held on to the little girl, though. Janet wasn’t fit. He’d still got his little Sharon.

It was nice to have a woman around the place again.

He was strict with the boys, but he was fair — fairer than his Da had been. Fresh air was good for kids and he saw to it they had as much as they could handle. They all went up to the Blue John Mines and the Treak Cliff Caverns and he walked their legs off. They couldn’t afford to go into the mines, but you could take sandwiches and tea in a Thermos and sit up there on the top of the world in God’s Own Country. They ate sarnies and scrambled about, and picked mountain flowers and pressed them in those old-fashioned wooden presses. The day he smashed one across her face, it left the mark of a key on her skin. Never in front of the kids, though. He was careful that way.

Once he got her up to speed she was brilliant. A great little cook, kept herself nice and the house was sparkling — you could tell she’d been a nurse, you could eat off her floors. He called her Miss Hospital Corners and she’d laugh. If he said she could laugh.

When she left him the first time, he was gobsmacked, he had to admit it. He came home and found her gone, but she only got as far as the alleyway behind the house, with the girl with her. It was a fair old walk to the bus stop and the suitcase was holding her back. He got in the car and damn near mowed the pair of them down. He had to make her see she had to stop.

When he’d finished with her he put her to bed. “Your mum’s not well,” he told the kids. “I’ll do us cheese on toast.” Then they watched cartoons.

Maybe he’d gone a bit far that time.

The second time, she got as far as her dad’s house. He was a superior sort of shite. Only a miner, but he fancied himself like, and he quoted stuff at you, the way his Ma quoted scripture. With him it was Shakespeare and poetry. Golf he played, fucking poncey game. They never talked much. The old sod pretended he couldn’t understand his accent and he got pissed off. Holding his temper made him tired.

It took a lot of hearts and flowers to get her back that time but he did it. Things’d be different this time, he said, and he meant it. Let’s get married, he said. He meant that too.

They started over again in a new house the council found for her — she got that sort of priority, with the kids and all, so he moved in with her and got an old alcy for his place — they always needed rooms. It was a housing association place, though, and they’d never let well alone. They were always on at you — told you what plants you could have in your garden, made you keep your hedges tidy and all that bollocks, like it was any of their fucking business.

He lost his job not long after. The Post Office found out about him dumping the mail. But he got another job, this time as a cabbie. Nobody asked questions and you could work what hours you liked. That suited him. Most nights he drove past the house. Just to see.

She always had his dinner ready. He’d come in and find her waiting. She had this way of bobbing about on her toes. If she didn’t move fast enough he’d push her in front of him, just slowly at first, sit her down at the kitchen table, rest the weight of his hand on her shoulder. Then he’d unscrew the lightbulb. “Sit there,” he’d say, and there she’d sit, in the dark, while he ate his meal in the living room, watching the telly. If she so much as took her head out of her hands, he’d know. What happened then depended on how he felt. Nine times out of ten he let her off with it.

One night he came home from the pub and fell on the doorstep. It was that reinforced glass, with wee wires cross-hatching it every half-inch, but you could still cut yourself pretty badly and he did. The blood just poured out of him with a soft glugging sound, like beer in a glass. He heard it soaking into the carpet as he rolled onto his back. She came downstairs at the noise. She said something to the kids and they went away, and then she sat on the top step and looked at him, just looked at him, with her arms wrapped around herself. He could see her pink furry slippers in the light from the hallway, and the tip of her cigarette glowing in the dark.

He hadn’t died, obviously.

She’d waited for it though. She told him as much. Come light, she went back to bed — it was the milkman who phoned the ambulance. Ten units of blood they put in him at the hospital.

When he got back, the house was all redecorated. She used the money she’d found under the carpet when she cleaned up. Well, he couldn’t complain really. He didn’t have a leg to stand on there. It was kind of funny really.

He wrote his mother to say he was getting married again, and he should have known better, he thought later. She went on and on about him pledging to another before God when his wife was still in the body, but she said she was willing to meet Maggie, once they’d had the ceremony. All the way to Glasgow, Maggie didn’t touch her face — got her makeup just right, she said, and she didn’t want to spoil it. She looked champion, he had to admit. She was a credit to him.

But he’d forgotten the crucifixes. On every wall, almost. Just to remind you that you were nobody, that you were just the same as the others. He wanted out of there as soon as they arrived. Maggie slept in his old room and he was in the parlour, down by the fire. His mother wouldn’t let them be in the same room alone together, even though they were married for all she knew. Fat lot of use that had been. She said God didn’t acknowledge their union, that their relationship was unholy. He wished then that he hadn’t bothered with the rings — he got them at a funfair, shooting plastic ducks. He was good with a gun, always had been.

Where Maggie was sleeping there was a Christ on the wall that frightened him all his childhood, the blood running down his sides and the twisted face. Suffering for all mankind. “God watches us all,” read the notice on the bedhead.

Like God gave a shit about him.

God wasn’t watching him when he did that warehouse when he was 13. Some people could get away with murder, but not him. They banged him up straight for that and his Da gave him the hiding of his life when he got out. Then that silly bloody waitress, screaming like a stuck pig the time he took her cherry. He had to threaten to chib her just to shut her up — him, who’d never chibbed a woman in his life.

He was 15 then. Another spell banged up for nothing.

He was a hard man and in Glasgow that counted for something. Something these soft English bastards would never understand. The pride you had, the power it gave you. The respect people had for you. She saw that when they walked down Sauchiehall Street together — the way people knew him, acknowledged him. People there knew he was somebody. In Yorkshire he was nobody. He didn’t know how he’d ended up here. Most dangerous man in Wakefield, they called him. Like that was difficult, like that meant something.

They called him Stan because of the knife he carried. A little joke, but he still had the knife.

When they got back she said it was a fresh start. I’ll get a little job, she said. You should see a doctor, she said. He thought she meant for the other. It was the drink that caused that, he said, it happens to everyone. But no, it was the drinking she meant. She thought if he stopped drinking, everything would be different. Like they’d be Mr and Mrs Fucking Average.

Still, he went and a lot of fucking use it was, like when he went to AA. They wanted you to crawl on your knees, say you were sorry for everything. Everything you could remember and everything you couldn’t. A man couldn’t be responsible for his actions all the time, he said. Some people had it coming. They asked him not to come back. Said he wasn’t ready.

It was the only time he felt alive, really alive. He was like God himself when it came on him. And no harm done — a man could take a lot before it killed him. The exhaustion that ran through him afterwards, like he’d used every muscle in his body. The noise that they never got right in films. The pain that made him feel alive. If it hurt enough, he could just let himself go. He never slept so well as afterwards.

Sometimes it came out of nowhere and then it surprised him. He couldn’t answer for it then — that had always been there, like the top coming off. But sometimes he felt it building, like dancing in the veins and he knew someone was in for it — the first person who said something was in for it. When you got them then, it was sweetness itself.

But Maggie. What happened with Maggie was just practising — he had to refine it, keep it in trim. You had to work on it, he thought. It was a skill you could lose.

He’d sat in that quack’s office, in the fake leather chair and the quack looked at him like he was shit on his shoes.

“If there was a cure for what you are, Mr Taylor, the prisons would be empty,” he said.

This was the same tosser that had said there was nothing wrong with Maggie. She was passing out all the fucking time, in shops, in bus queues. Of course there was something wrong with her. Anyone could see it. She was getting that bloodless look Janet’d had.

After the thing with the cigarette, he bought her a long-sleeved blouse to wear to work. He didn’t mind her having a job really — it brought a bit of money in and she nicked sandwiches from the pub for him to take to work the next day. But it was changing her. It was changing things between them. Last night, when he walked back into the kitchen, she’d already put a lamp on and was sitting there, reading. She looked him right in the eye.

“The prisons would be empty.” What fucking use was that to a man?

She was going to leave him, wasn’t she? She thought he didn’t know, but he knew. She was planning something. She had that look about her.

He felt the weight of the knife in his pocket. Wide and broad in the hand, flat against his palm. He kept a carpet hook on it for preference. He ran his thumb along the channel, felt the cross-hatching on the handle, the notch that locked the blade into place. Clicked it up, clicked it down.

It was going to be alright, he thought. She wouldn’t leave him a third time.

This time he’d sort it.